


Swear I Still Do

by tastewithouttalent



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Developing Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Insomnia, M/M, Reunions, Smoking, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-23
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-09-16 08:47:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16950792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tastewithouttalent/pseuds/tastewithouttalent
Summary: "Stein is sure that in the end the reality of Spirit Albarn will be, inevitably, more brilliant and vivid than anything his monochrome imagination can ever invent in himself." Spirit isn't the weapon Stein left behind him, but amidst a decade of changes some things are still fixed as gravity.





	1. Reminiscent

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inujuju](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inujuju/gifts).



Stein has spent years thinking about this moment. All the months he’s spent away from Death City, all the nights made as vast and endless as eternity by the silence of insomnia: his thoughts have always wandered back here, to the point of his return and the possibilities of the future. He has crafted dozens of reunions, hundreds of conversations, warm and cold and bitter and affectionate, formed only to be discarded as easily as he breathes out the smoke of the cigarettes that are the closest thing to warmth he has left in his life. It’s enough to pass the time, enough to spark something like interest against the dug-in grooves of his broken mind; and he lets them melt away with the dawn, lets possibility and hope alike slip through his fingers, because he’s sure that in the end the reality of Spirit Albarn will be, inevitably, more brilliant and vivid than anything his monochrome imagination can ever invent in himself.

It is different. Stein has imagined this scene countless times, has cast and recast his thoughts as if to capture some part of the weapon partner who has always been too much for him to hold, too much for him to restrain; and even then, even with years of time, Spirit throws over Stein’s expectations as if they aren’t even there, chooses a path to walk that Stein hadn’t thought existed. Stein was ready for hatred, was expecting disdain or rejection or anger; he had dreamt of warmth, of compassion and joy and pleasure shining in those bright eyes even knowing full well he has no claim to any of that. But what he finds waiting for him isn’t the stern Death Scythe he had expected, isn’t the affectionate boy he remembers, but a man, cracked open by the weight of life itself to leave him bleeding out into the space around him with no aid from the edge of Stein’s scalpel at all. Spirit looks at Stein with eyes Stein has never seen before, heavy with a need for sleep and shadowed into unhealthy bruises by drink, and stress, and misery; and Spirit’s expression crumbles, melting into emotion more transparent than anything Stein saw from him even when they were children, and when he presses his head to Stein’s shoulder and sobs there is nothing under the sound but absolute, all-encompassing relief, the one thing Stein never expected to have waiting for him.

They leave ChupaCabra’s immediately. It’s not an environment in which Stein is comfortable or graceful but he would stay for Spirit, would measure out the whole of the evening by the flicker of neon lights just for the sight of those same playing off hair more brilliant than anything artificiality can offer. But Spirit is collapsing, crumpling in on himself as if Stein’s presence has finally given him permission to give up on some hollow façade of functioning, and whatever Stein may feel about their surroundings it doesn’t take Soul Perception to understand that this is the last place his weapon should be. He makes excuses for the both of them, smiling politely through the social interactions he has learned to navigate with success if not ease, and when he turns to step out of the bar and onto the streets of the city he does so with Spirit braced close against the support of his shoulder.

Stein wasn’t expecting this. He had imagined, had dreamed, had wandered through fantasies so far removed from reality as to be no better than the murmur of his Madness spreading itself out to web his veins; but even his most impossible daydreams have been of Spirit reaching for him by choice, of those warm hands drawing across his scar-marked skin with intent. Instead he has Spirit here, closer than Stein ever really expected to have him, leaning heavily against the whole of Stein’s chest and clinging to the other’s neck with a desperate grip, and so unsteady with the combination of shock and alcohol and emotion that Stein truly doubts Spirit’s ability to hold himself upright without the brace of the other against him. It’s not romantic, even accounting for the inevitable transmutation of dreams into reality: it’s desperate, anxious, the hold of a man so used to falling he can’t believe the fact of a fixed point when it offers itself to him. Stein might find that funny, at another time, in another place -- he’s hardly used to thinking of himself as the stable one of them both, after all -- but Spirit’s fingers at the collar of his jacket are holding onto him with an anxiety that some instinct in Stein recognizes, something that runs as deep through him as the Madness he has cultivated and formed to genius, and at this moment Stein isn’t mad, isn’t himself, is nothing more or less than the meister the weapon at his side needs him to be.

He waits to speak until they are some distance away from ChupaCabra’s. It seems best to distance Spirit from the coping mechanism the location has clearly been; for the distance of a block Stein considers taking the other home with him directly, pacing over the mile that will carry them out of the city limits and to the doors of the laboratory that was their home, that is Stein’s once more, that is as much a fixture of Stein’s existence as the man currently draped boneless-heavy around his shoulder. But Stein’s thoughts hum at the idea of that, at the familiarity of sterile walls and blood-vivid hair, and if he hasn’t been able to strip his Madness from himself he has learned to separate it at need, to act on conscious choice rather than in answer to the raw instinct his mind whispers to him. He grimaces away the thought, blinking hard to dislodge the image of Spirit’s bare skin under the shine of a razor’s edge, and when he lifts his hand to turn the screw through his head it’s with intention behind the act, a focus to apply himself to the task of being the meister he needs to be right now.

“Senpai.” Spirit’s head comes up, his focus dragged onto Stein for a moment by the weight of the old title, but his gaze hardly holds the other’s eyes for a breath before sliding away as if the effort of keeping his head upright is too much for him to bear, as if the weight of gravity itself is drawing his focus towards the cobblestones under their feet. Stein tightens his hold around Spirit’s waist; a necessity more than an indulgence, if they are to keep continuing down the street. “Where’s your home?”

“Huh?” That pulls up Spirit’s head, if again only for a moment. “The lab? Why are you…” His words die to silence, his feet stumble still; when he ducks his head forward it’s to lift a hand to shove roughly through the weight of his hair. The color parts like waves around his fingers, the shape of it forming ripples around his face; even with his hand covering his features Stein can hear the sharp-edged laugh the other coughs free.

“Not the lab,” he mumbles, softly enough that Stein is sure it’s only Spirit’s intoxication that gave the words force enough to be heard. “Fuck. Get it together, Spirit.” And he drops his hand, lifting his head and his shoulders into the appearance of focus that feels as brittle under Stein’s hold as it looks. “Down at the end of the main street leading in front of the Academy. The blue house on the right.”

Stein’s mouth pulls up at the corner in spite of himself. “You haven’t changed,” he observes, more for himself than on Spirit’s behalf, and tugs gently to urge the other into movement again. “You don’t know your own address yet?”

“I know it,” Spirit retorts stoutly. “It’s 467…” and his voice trails off along with his steps stalling again. Stein wonders for a moment if he ought to ask the other to transform, just to make carrying him easier; but even the simplicity of transformation could veer into a crisis, if Spirit is as drunk and tired as he seems, and walking down the street openly wielding a Death Weapon will be a fast way to cause a panic. They are both good reasons, sufficient to defend the reality of Stein’s motivation from any scrutiny but his own, which acknowledges as if reading a page from a book that Spirit’s arm is warm around his neck, and Spirit’s hair is catching against the stitches in his coat, and this reality is too immediate for Stein to intentionally free himself from as yet. So he draws to a halt alongside Spirit, his footsteps stalled again by the inaction of the other’s, and he breathes in the imagined taste of scarlet on his tongue, and he waits.

“No,” Spirit says, finally, after Stein has let a double handful of seconds trickle unmeasured through his fingers. “That’s not it either. I haven’t lived there since Maka was a little girl.” He pushes through his hair again, this time with such force that Stein can hear the protest as tangled knots drag free under the other’s fingers. “I’m in an apartment now. On the second floor, number...number 295.” He lifts his arm to gesture vaguely towards the Academy before letting it drop as if the weight is too much for him to support. “It’s that way.”

Stein turns to follow the indication of Spirit’s upraised arm. Spirit lets himself be moved without protest, even if his steps are so sluggish Stein has to support more than half his weight just to keep him from falling outright. Stein doesn’t mind for himself, but Spirit’s breathing is rasping as if the minimal effort of walking is costing him impossible physical strength, and when he speaks the same sound of tension in his throat is clearly audible on his voice as much as his breathing.

“I’m sorry,” he says, as if he has anything to apologize for, as if he’s not taking the words right off Stein’s lips the same way he always used to assume responsibility for them both, stepping into duties with such certainty that Stein had known, even then, that it was a future Death Weapon under his hands. “I’m such a mess, Stein.” He coughs another laugh; there’s no humor in this at all, nothing but pain as if he’s transformed a blade to catch at the inside of his chest and tear him apart with every breath he takes. “I’m not what I’m supposed to be. To anyone. To Maka, to Lord Death, to the students. You’re...you were right to leave, Stein, I would have just let you down eventually too.”

Stein doesn’t correct Spirit on his faulty memory: that it was he who left, who turned his back and tore Stein’s heart from his chest and the color from his life at one and the same time, that retreating across the distance of a continent was the only way Stein could think of to stem the bleeding from that loss that felt endless, for the first years, for all the years, every time he forgot himself enough to look at it directly. He doesn’t know what his actions seemed from Spirit’s perspective; it wasn’t a consideration in his mind at the time, any more than the memory is one he cares to relive.

“You didn’t,” he says instead, simple truth the best he can find to offer.

Spirit drags over a breath that tears into a sob at his lips. “Because you were gone,” he says. “You were away being a hero and a genius and...and I _missed_ you, Stein, every time someone said your name it was like…” He turns his head in, pressing so close against Stein’s shirtfront that Stein almost doesn’t begrudge the lost ending of that slurring sentence. “I just wanted you to come back, Stein, come back and be my meister like you used to be and we. You would…but you were gone, you were _gone_ , you never came back for me.”

Stein’s feet are still moving, still stepping to carry him forward over the span of the pavement across which he’s leading Spirit’s stumbling weight, but he thinks they might as well be wheels moving along a train track for how much control he has over his present action. “Senpai--”

“I don’t blame you,” Spirit blurts. “I wouldn’t have wanted me either. I’m a nuisance, a pervert and a drunk and a failure, I would have only gotten in your way.” His fingers at Stein’s coat tighten, his grip pulls hard enough to draw the fabric sideways on the other’s shoulders. Stein can feel the weight of Spirit’s touch right through the thick knit of his shirt like it’s not there at all.

“But I’m glad,” Spirit says, mumbling now, like his volume a moment before is a thing forgotten and gone. “I’m glad you came back. I’m glad you’re here.” He chokes over another one of those laughs closer to a sob than amusement. “I’m such a failure I can’t even let you go.”

Stein wonders, distantly over the pounding of his heart in his chest, if it’s some fragment of Resonance that pulls those words from his thoughts to Spirit’s lips, some lingering effect like the prickle of near-electricity that he has felt as a compass must feel a magnet over all these years, no matter how far he traveled from the point of all his caring. Perhaps it is Stein’s shadows that are casting Spirit’s color to darkness, that have dampened his fire to no more than a desperate, dying flicker. Or maybe the weight was in Spirit himself, a burden happily shared with the support of another but as impossible for him to bear alone as the endless void in Stein’s soul has been for the meister to fill, no matter how many years pass. It’s a curiosity, a point worth exploring, perhaps, someday; but even Stein’s instinct for experiment can’t drive him to wish a repeat of this particular experience, for either of them.

Spirit falls silent after that. Stein can’t be sure he’s not still speaking, mumbling words too soft to make it to the meister’s ears, but if he is it’s too quiet for Stein to hear them as anything more than the ragged near-sobs that are serving Spirit for breath, and Stein is focused on their end goal with the intensity needed to override the impulse of want purring in his mind. He could take Spirit back to the laboratory, could return him to their past and resume where they left off all those years ago, their retreat through time eased by alcohol and the emotion feeding in on itself with every breath Spirit takes against him; but there is more in him than the raw want, more to his logic than amoral curiosity. Concern is a new emotion, worry something Stein had never even thought to feel until he saw Spirit’s hunched shoulders in the corner of the bar; but it’s staging an attack he can feel himself surrendering to even as he observes it. There are many things he wants from Spirit, some sane and some not and all intense; but right now he wants something for Spirit more, and that is the peace and comfort that will come with a familiar bed, and a quiet night, and long hours of uninterrupted sleep. So Stein bears the other down the streets of the city, and all but carries him up the stairs to the door of his apartment, and when Spirit drops his key in his effort to unlock the door Stein bends over to retrieve it while Spirit braces an arm against the doorframe and slumps the burden of his body against the support before him.

It’s Stein who opens the lock and pushes the door open; in the end it’s only when he catches his arm back around Spirit’s waist to urge him forward that the other manages to straighten over his own feet sufficiently to come forward into the dark of his apartment. Stein leaves him leaning by the doorway and struggling to get his shoes off while he runs his fingers along the walls in search of a lightswitch. By the time he flips the switch to flood the hallway with light that seems startlingly bright to his night-adjusted eyes Spirit has worked one shoe off and is balancing on that same foot as he struggles with the weight of the other. The shoe slides free just as Stein looks over, giving way with minimal speed that still proves too much for Spirit’s unsteady sense of balance; Stein reaches out to catch at Spirit’s arm to keep him from falling as he drops the shoe to the tile of the entryway and stumbles forward as if to fall right out the door they’ve just come through.

“Careful,” Stein says, his tone perfectly neutral even as his fingers brace as tight against Spirit’s arm as if the other is in his weapon form and preparing to face down a Kishin Egg. He wants to look down the hallway, wants to step into the space of Spirit’s present life and see the shape of it, wants to read the trajectory of the other’s existence from the form his presence has taken around him; but more than that he wants to maintain his hold on Spirit’s arm, wants to press his touch in closer against that uncertain balance to strip away whatever tremor might be there and steady them both to calm certainty. “You really are drunk, senpai.”

Spirit snorts. “I’ve had worse,” he says, with some fraction of his old recklessness; and then, as that flickers and dies to resignation, as he ducks his head forward to hide his expression behind his hair: “It’s not as if this is an unusual end to my night.”

Stein doesn’t respond to that. He can see the proof of the statement in the haggard lines of Spirit’s face, saw it in the familiarity of his slouch over the bar counter at ChupaCabra’s; he can feel it in the quake in Spirit’s grip on his arm, that uncertainty in his own footing too well-learned to be given up just for the uncommon support of a hand against him. Stein keeps his hold as still as he can make it, holding Spirit upright with as little attention as he can draw to the action, and Spirit gets both feet under himself before lifting his head to survey his surroundings like he’s trying to recall where he is. “What was I doing?”

“You should go to bed,” Stein suggests in a perfectly neutral tone, without any judgment or warmth either one on the words. “You’re barely able to stand, senpai.”

Spirit laughs humorlessly. “That’s true.” He lifts his arm free of Stein’s hold and turns to fumble towards a doorway just to the side of the entrance; Stein only pauses long enough to push the front door shut behind them before he comes forward to follow Spirit towards the shadows of the bedroom. Spirit gets the light on but doesn’t turn to stop or encourage Stein in following him; he’s looking at his feet, moving slowly as he brings a hand to tug distracted effort against the buttons of his coat. Stein trails behind him, reaching out to slide his fingers under the shoulders of Spirit’s coat so he can slide the weight back and off the other’s arms as soon as Spirit has freed the fastenings; Spirit looks back at the contact, blinking like he’s surprised by Stein’s continued presence, but when Stein turns to find a hanger Spirit collapses back onto the bed, falling heavy over the sheets without any effort to keep himself upright. He’s still there when Stein turns back, sprawled over the bed with his hair tangled around his face and his lashes shadowing heavy over his eyes; his cheeks are still flushed with emotion and intoxication together, but from how slow his breathing has gone Stein thinks he might be already drifting towards sleep in spite of a whole host of reasons for him to stay awake. Stein hesitates for a moment, wondering if he should leave, wanting to stay, afraid of his own temptation, before he finally settles himself enough to come forward and reach for Spirit’s arm.

“Senpai.” Spirit doesn’t stir at the touch; Stein tightens his grip against the other’s shoulder and shakes as gently as he can, until Spirit groans and stirs towards some measure of consciousness. “You’ll be more comfortable under the blankets.”

Spirit shakes his head without opening his eyes. “I don’t need them,” he says, sounding as petulant as a child, but he doesn’t actually protest Stein tugging the blankets free from under his weight. He even opens his eyes for the weight of the sheets layering around him, blinking such vague inattention at Stein that the other thinks he must be past the point of recognition anyway; but when Stein straightens to move towards the door Spirit pushes up from the bed with more speed than Stein thought him master of to reach out and clutch his fingers tight at the edge of the other’s sleeve.

“Don’t,” he says, his speech slurred but his panic audible. “Don’t go.” His fingers curl to a fist on Stein’s heavy jacket; when Spirit shakes his head his hair falls over his face, tangling on itself even as he moves. “Don’t leave again.”

Stein stands still for a moment, caught where he is by the curl of Spirit’s fingers in the fall of his coat and with his speech stolen from his lips by the knot of unfamiliar warmth at his chest. He blinks at Spirit in front of him, his eyes burning with unfamiliar heat, but Spirit doesn’t look up to meet his gaze, and Stein doesn’t know how what name to give his own feelings without seeing them reflected in Spirit’s eyes. So he stands still, held in place by his own uncertainty for long seconds, before he finally blinks and lifts his hand towards Spirit’s hair.

“I’ll come back,” he says. His fingers touch against the vivid glow of that red, his palm settles against the strands; Spirit ducks his head forward and Stein slides his hand back with gentle care. “After you’ve slept. I’ll be back in the morning.” His fingers curl against the trailing ends of Spirit’s hair, his fingerprints fit to the feathery ends of the vivid color that has laid itself to such a fundamental part of Spirit’s existence, such an unattainable necessity of Stein’s reality. “I already came back once, after all.”

Stein doesn’t know if it’s the calm of his words that soothes Spirit, or the touch of his hand, or just the passage of time sufficient to draw the other’s consciousness free of his own hold and send him sliding back into the endless dark of dreamless sleep. Spirit’s hold does ease, his shoulders do give up their strength, and when he falls back to the pillow the motion draws him away from Stein’s touch and pulls that saturated color of his hair away to spill over the sheets instead. Stein stands at the edge of the bed for a moment, looking down at the lines of loneliness and pain and loss that have carved themselves into Spirit’s face, seeing the familiarity of his partner in the face of a stranger, and then finally he slides his hand into his pocket and turns to leave the room again, only pausing to turn off the lightswitch and tug the door shut behind him. He locks the front door from the inside and pulls until it latches, testing the turn of the handle to make sure it really is fixed, and then he turns away to look out at the shadows of the night and the long, silent walk that will carry him back to his laboratory.

He doesn’t mind the quiet, with the anticipation of the future to light his path as clearly as the moonlight does.


	2. Methodical

Stein doesn’t expect Spirit to recall much of the night before. He was sure the other’s awareness of his surroundings was incidental by the time they came in the front door of Spirit’s apartment, and he wouldn’t be surprised to know that most of the evening before was wiped clear by the effect of alcohol and exhaustion working together to override his weapon’s recollection. The odds of Spirit expecting him to arrive the next morning are so vanishingly low that when Stein knocks against the smooth-painted wood of the door in question he’s wondering if the other won’t still be asleep, if Stein’s knock won’t be the first thing to drag him to consciousness from whatever hazy dreams he may be caught in.

It’s not. That much is clear as soon as Stein’s hand is dropping from the wood, as the muffled-thin shout of  _ “Coming! _ ” carries through the span of the barrier between them. Spirit is awake, at least, and alert enough to respond to a knock, and Stein finds his stomach swooping as if he’s tumbled into sudden free-fall, as if the moments between that acknowledgment and the door coming open are some abruptly impossible distance for him to span. He has to look away from the door, has to fix his gaze on the neutral simplicity of the sidewalk running along the street below as he lifts a hand to the screw running through his head to twist it sharply enough to scatter the strange illumination of the pressure knotting itself into place within his chest.

The door comes open while Stein is still looking away from the entrance. Stein can see the flicker of color out of the corner of his eye, can see the spill of brilliance that always comes with Spirit’s hair, and the endless drop of his stomach stops as abruptly as if it has suddenly slammed into the pavement below. Stein’s attention shifts, drawn inexorably to Spirit before him as iron to a magnet, his focus swinging around to fix on the other’s face as soon as he has the chance. Spirit is staring at him, eyes wide and lips parted and face white with shock, and it’s as Stein gazes at the disbelief in the other’s expression -- at the overt surprise clear as a shout across his face -- that the screw through his head settles into place with a  _ click _ that he can feel thud through the length of his spine with the satisfaction of understanding.

Stein lets his hand fall to his side. He doesn’t need the screw’s assistance to make sense of this, not when Spirit is wearing his feelings as clear on his face as the sleep-wrinkled shirt on his shoulders. “Hey there senpai,” Stein drawls, and watches a whole host of emotions chase themselves across Spirit’s face at this casual greeting. “Want me to make you some breakfast? I brought coffee.”

Spirit blinks, his gaze falling from Stein’s face to the container of instant coffee the other is offering for just a moment before it leaps back up. He’s staring as if he’s never seen Stein before, as if he’s looking at a hallucination more than flesh and blood; Stein just stares right back, feeling himself forming to greater presence as if in answer to the need in Spirit’s blue eyes. Finally Spirit gives up his breath in a huff, sounding as if the air is being forced from his lungs, and he ducks his head into a nod as he steps to the side of the door with a “Yeah” that sounds as much like shock as an actual affirmative.

Stein doesn’t wait for more. He steps over the threshold, returning himself to the space of Spirit’s life by invitation instead of intrusion, this time; he can feel the warmth in the air prickle across his skin like static electricity sliding over him. Spirit shuts the door behind them, pausing with his back still to Stein, and Stein turns aside to come forward down the hallway without waiting for more. He isn’t sure what Spirit might say, given the space to frame words; he isn’t sure what he might do, marooned on the tiny island of tile at the entryway of Spirit’s apartment with the two of them close enough for him to hear every breath the other takes. Better for him to step forward, to take up his old role as meister and propel them both forward, and let the self-assurance in his stride pull Spirit’s uncertain steps along in his wake.

Stein doesn’t look back. He can hear Spirit following him, can feel the weight of unvoiced uncertainty in the other’s breathing, and the best thing Stein has ever had to offer his partner is his own assumed certainty in everything he does. So he moves as if it’s his apartment he’s pacing through instead of the unexplored life of the weapon he hasn’t seen for a decade and more, the man who has haunted him as surely as a ghost even as he went on living his own life in place of Stein’s fractured one.

Not that Spirit has been doing much better. Stein has seen the cracks in him, the evidence of those same wounds that Stein himself sewed into the tracks of physical scars until the face in the mirror looked as mended-over as his life has felt, over all this time alone. Spirit’s suit jacket covers the wrinkles in his shirts, and the crease of his slacks might hide the tremor in his legs, but startled out of composure his wide eyes tell the story as much by their shock at a visitor as by the creases of tension at their corners and the smudge of sleeplessness beneath them. There are dishes left undone in the sink, a few plates and a whole host of glasses to speak to a habit towards intoxication that overruns the narrow confines of the cheerful bar and the well-paid girls who work there, but Stein doesn’t comment, doesn’t even let his gaze linger long enough to acknowledge the mess. He steps past sink and dishes together to the counter beyond, where he sets down the container of instant coffee before dropping to a knee at the floor so he can peer into the cabinets on either side of the stove set into the center of the space.

“What are you looking for?” Spirit sounds wary, as if Stein might be looking for ingredients for explosives instead of those for a meal. He has followed the other through the apartment; when Stein glances sideways around the frames of his glasses he can just see Spirit in his periphery, hovering uncertainly at the corner of the kitchen like he’s unsure of his welcome even within the structure of his own life.

“A pan,” Stein says, and shuts one of the cabinet doors on a stacked set of colanders bright enough to make him doubt that they’re ever been used. “I could make a pot work too, if it’s big enough, but it’ll come out better with a pan.”

“They aren’t down there,” Spirit says. “Here, let me--” and he steps into the kitchen, moving around Stein to reach up and over him. Stein tips his head to look up without moving to the standing position that would put him almost atop Spirit beside him; Spirit pulls open one of the overhead cabinets and stretches to retrieve a pair of frying pans stacked one inside the other before setting them on the counter and lifting his hand to push his hair back behind his ear. “How big do you need?”

Stein gets up slowly, moving with enough care to leave Spirit plenty of time to retreat if he wants. The fact that he remains where he is is enough to glow warmth through Stein’s blood until he imagines his face might even be approximating something like human color instead of his usual near-grey pallor. He reaches past Spirit to claim the topmost pan, small enough that the dark surface of it is hardly larger than his open palm. “This’ll work.”

Spirit ducks his head forward in a motion that is probably meant to be a nod and looks more like a retreat from the weight of Stein’s attention. His hair falls forward around his features again. “Great.” He reaches to return the other pan to its place, fussing with the positioning even though as far as Stein can tell the effort is completely needless, before pushing the cabinet door shut. He pauses for a moment, half-turned away from the counter like he’s thinking of twisting to face Stein properly, but when he takes a breath and speaks he does it over his shoulder, with the fall of his hair still hiding the details of his expression from Stein’s steady gaze. “Do you need anything else?”

Stein wants to touch his fingers to Spirit’s hair, wants to slide that crimson color over his palm and feel the glow of heat he always imagines into being against his skin and shimmering into his blood. He wants to step in to pin Spirit back against the counter behind him, wants to smooth his fingers over those bruises of sleeplessness and drag his lips to the creases of stress between Spirit’s brows and the afterimage of the frown lingering at the corners of his curving mouth. More than all of that, he wants Spirit to finish that turn, wants that hand bracing at the counter with such determined force to reach out over the inches between them to touch his arm, his wrist, his face, to bridge the gap that has been such a wall for so many years and that feels so impossibly thin now, like the delicate tracery of morning dew fated to give way to the warmth of daylight. Spirit is close enough to touch, close enough to want, close enough to crave; and Stein turns away to look back to the counter as he shakes his head.

“No,” he says, and picks up the pan as he turns to pull open the refrigerator and claim what basic ingredients he needs from there. “You can sit down if you’d like, I’ve got it from here.”

Stein isn’t sure for a moment that Spirit will obey the implicit order. It’s been so long since they spoke, longer still since Stein wielded him; Spirit has formed a structure for his own life, however frail that apparently has proven. For a moment Stein wishes for his words to go ignored, wishes for Spirit to reach out, to touch, to ask; but there’s no surprise in him when Spirit huffs a breath of resignation and moves to step past the other and retreat to the dining table a few paces away from the kitchen. Stein glances over the top of the refrigerator door to watch as Spirit settles himself into a chair, as Spirit pushes his restless fingers through his hair, and then he looks down and away again, returning his attention to the fridge before the other sees the open want in his eyes.

Stein knows what he wants, can read the truth of his own desire in the strain in Spirit’s shoulders and the tension of those fingers barely restrained from reaching out over the impossible distance between them. But there’s something else in Spirit’s face, too, a bruise of hurt that runs deeper than any touch can reach. Spirit needs a meister right now more even than a lover, and after everything Spirit has been for him, Stein thinks the least he can do is give him what he needs.


	3. Solitary

The third time they turn back to return to Spirit’s apartment, Stein waits outside to smoke a cigarette. It’s a sacrifice, of sorts -- there’s a pleasure just to being in the other’s home, to lingering within the span of the walls and imagining himself a resident within them, to shaping his imagination to the reality of the life that Spirit has been leading -- but there’s a comfort to the taste of the smoke, and after more than an hour of stringing his adrenaline far higher than he’s accustomed to Stein thinks it will do him better to take a few minutes to himself than to go on trailing Spirit as he has been.

It does help. Stein’s aware of his own addiction, in the coldly clinical way that he’s aware of his Madness, that he has traced out the lines of his own breaking onto his skin as well as his clothing; but that self-awareness doesn’t strip away the calm that comes with the nicotine, any more than knowing what the screw running through his skull achieves undoes the peace that comes of gears clicking over into a new, clearer alignment. Stein stays at the top flight of the narrow stairs that run up to the front door of Spirit’s apartment, and fills his lungs with the bitter drag of smoke, and as his eyes fix inattention on the street below his mind wanders far afield, tinging his thoughts to nostalgia instead of the crisp analysis he might give to any other subject but the one at hand.

He has missed Spirit. Stein has known this academically for years; when he first left the absence was so keen he imagined he could see it in the gap of his chest and he sometimes stood for hours in front of a mirror staring at his bare skin as if willing his ribcage to crack and bleed into the endless void contained within. He knows it’s there, knew it even as he drew a scalpel over his own body and proved to his keening mind that all his physical components were where they should be; it’s just another gap in the world, another mistake that reality has made in converting the truth that Stein feels in the marrow of his bones into existence. There is no way for Stein to fill that void alone, nothing he can do to mend that wound as much self-inflicted as anything else; so he learned to work around it, to push himself forward with the cold logic of an automaton and find a pattern to his life that he could follow by rote if not by desire. He has grown accustomed to the cold, has learned to function around the absence; to have a presence there to fill it now is so startling he doesn’t know how to fit himself around it. Who he is, who he has become, is so absolutely colored by that torn edge in his soul that having Spirit back, whole and himself and real, is urging his memory back in time, as if it might be easier to insist that the last decade never happened at all, that he is still the teenager he was when he saw Spirit last, that they can continue on with their lives together with their partnership never broken at all.

If Stein were alone he thinks he might give into it. He knows it’s insane, an application of logic that most people would balk at, but he’s never been particularly tied down by the judgments of strangers. If it were just him, if he could turn back his personal time and return to the life he once had -- but it’s not, not anymore, and the recollection of restraint is as foreign-familiar as everything else, as Stein faces the barrier to his unfettered actions that Spirit has always, will always be. Spirit won’t let them fall back into what they were, won’t let Stein ignore the years that have passed since they separated; Stein knows that absolutely, even if he hadn’t already seen the marks those same years have left on the man who was the boy he once knew. Time has passed, the years have marked and broken and mended them; and whatever future they may have now is one they will have to navigate from where they are, rather than what they used to be. Stein draws in a breath off his cigarette and feels the smoke of it burn all the way through the span of his lungs; and behind him the apartment door comes open to deposit Spirit onto the narrow landing alongside Stein’s slouch over the balcony.

“I am  _ so _ sorry,” Spirit blurts, offering the apology before he’s well out of the doorway. He’s turning back to pull the door shut behind him and fumble with the lock; he doesn’t see Stein straighten from the railing any more than he sees the slide of the other’s gaze tracing over him with an impulse that Stein can no more resist than he can stall the motion of his breath in his chest. Spirit pushes hurriedly at the fall of his hair to urge it behind his ear again, but the motion is so frantic the red just tumbles forward again as soon as he reaches for the doorhandle. “That’s the last of it.”

“You sure?” Stein asks, his voice drawling deadpan over the question. “You might have forgotten to bring your housekeys with you this time.” Spirit’s shoulders stiffen with uncertainty even as the lock under his grip turns over to the urging of the key in his hold; Stein’s mouth tugs onto a smile as he leans in to reach past Spirit’s shoulders and draw the key free of the other’s fingers.

“Here,” he says, and turns the key up to hold it out as if he’s offering a flower to the other. “You might need this again.”

Spirit snatches the key from Stein as his whole face flushes to a crimson nearly as dark as his hair. “Damn it, Stein,” he says, and turns to take the stairs to the street with a speed as if he means to make up for the multiple trips back to the apartment. “You haven’t changed at all.”

Stein watches Spirit descend the stairs, moving with speed enough that the patter of his footsteps sounds like rain against the concrete steps; it’s only when he hits the landing that the other realizes Stein isn’t behind him but still at the topmost level looking down. Spirit pauses at the top of the last flight of stairs to look back up, his forehead creasing on concern as he tips his head up to the illumination of the morning light and frowns at Stein.

“Stein?” There’s a note of worry in Spirit’s voice, more anxious than plaintive for the first time that Stein has heard since his return; when his gaze flickers over Stein it’s with the unthinking speed of consideration, the familiar glance of a weapon mapping out his meister’s stance for any sign of injury sustained during the frenetic whirl of combat, before he looks back up to the other’s face. “Are you okay?”

Stein had forgotten the way Spirit’s voice sounds on that question, the way he makes a rote inquiry into complete sincerity just by the weight of alarm under the words. When they were younger that question used to pull Stein back into himself, the rhythm of it enough to call him away from whatever precipice of blown-wide Madness he was teetering upon; now it forces him into the present, drags him up from the haze of nostalgia and loss and not-quite-loneliness that has been calling a siren song to him. He’s himself, standing in front of Spirit’s apartment door with his jacket over his shoulders and a cigarette at his lips: his skin is patterned with scars, his body cracked and healed from the untouched mania of his youth a dozen times, a hundred times, and Spirit wears his responsibilities like a burden, shows the weight of them as he never used to. But still: Spirit is still there, still looking up at Stein with that same look in his eyes even if the shadows around them show his years, and Stein feels himself grounded, present,  _ here _ in a way he can’t remember being over the span of all those years they spent apart.

Stein blinks hard and lifts a hand to draw his cigarette from his lips. “I’m fine,” he says, surprised by the sincerity of the words, and reaches to crush out the glow of the burning ember against the metal edge of the railing before he crumples the butt end in his fist and comes forward to follow Spirit down the stairs. “Let’s go, senpai.”

Things have changed: time, life, the both of them, together and apart, and their scars show too clearly on their skin to be ignored. But as Stein steps out onto the smooth of the sidewalk Spirit falls into step with him with all the grace of long-standing habit, and when Stein glances at him sideways the smile pulling at the corner of Spirit’s lips is as easy and unthinking as it has always been for Stein’s weapon partner.  



	4. Lighten

It’s a long walk home from the Academy.

Stein lingers long, far later into the night than the classes he is meant to teach demand. In actual practice he could do more at home, as far as preparation goes; but he’s new to the position, and confident enough in his own abilities to not be overly concerned with lesson plans. He can fill up a class session with lecture alone, if need be; and besides, his own thoughts are so scattered he can hardly recall whether he’s meant to be teaching or learning the information even as he gives it. His attention drifts, wandering down the hallways of the Academy as his Soul Perception flickers in the back of his mind; as if he needs any assistance from that extra sense to know where Spirit is, where he has been since they arrived this morning. It would be enough just to know that he’s the only Death Weapon present in the Academy to place him in Lord Death’s room for the whole of the day; with the not-quite-Resonance that Stein has carried with him over all the time apart, he’s sure of the other’s location even without the aid of logic.

He thinks of staying longer. Even Lord Death won’t keep his Death Weapon up all night, no matter how many discussions and plans they need to make; Stein could be waiting outside the Death Room when Spirit emerges, could lift a hand and offer a smirk and fall into step with the other as easily as they have fallen back into each other’s lives. But the same concern that colored Spirit’s gaze this morning lingers in Stein’s thoughts, casting a shadow of uncertainty over even his most rosy imaginings, and in the end Stein abandons the chair he’s been idly spinning in for hours to get to his feet and leave the Academy outright. He doesn’t want to impose his presence on Spirit, not when it could be an extra layer of responsibility beyond what the other has already taken on; and besides, Stein thinks he could do with the time alone, just to give his thoughts time to settle and recalibrate to something a bit closer to his ordinary perspective on the world.

He takes a long route home. The laboratory is far distant from the Academy to begin with, a lengthy stroll of almost thirty minutes even with Stein’s steady, ground-covering strides; when he adds in extended, rambling deviations that take him through the narrow alleys and dark corridors of the city it becomes an undertaking lengthy enough to hang the moon well clear of the landscape of the buildings around him before he clears the city limits and begins the trek up the hill towards the silhouette of the distant laboratory. Stein’s skin is cold, his face and hands long-since chilled with the wind that comes with the falling of night in what is, after all, a desert, but he doesn’t move to warm himself beyond the slow-burning ember of the cigarette he’s been smoking for what feels like a minor eternity within the wandering paths of his thoughts.

He can feel Spirit with him. He knows he’s alone -- this is a far cry from the hallucinations of the old days, the ones that gripped him forcibly and stripped his grasp on reality from him, the ones he gave in to as often as being defeated by them just for the relief of what illusory comfort he might find within. But Spirit is here, really here, even at the physical distance they are at Stein is closer than he has been to his partner in long, long years, and that is comfort enough to undo whatever chill the wind carries on it. Stein paces the cobblestones of the city, and breathes long curls of smoke into the air, and when the dim glow of the streetlights catches at the silver he sees glimpses of crimson in every breath.

The laboratory is silent when Stein comes through the front door. This is hardly a surprise; it’s not as if there is ever anyone waiting for him within the stern weight of the walls, not anymore. But the memory of Spirit’s presence seems to cling to Stein’s thoughts as much as the smoke of his cigarettes clings to his clothes, and what carried the familiarity of a living space this morning now feels like no more than cold walls lacking all the human warmth of Spirit’s disorderly apartment, absent all the signs of life to make it a home instead of just an empty space. Stein stands in the entryway for a long moment, the door still open behind him and without any light but what the moon overhead sheds onto his shoulders and into the entrance; and then he shuts his eyes, and he breathes in deep, and he lets himself slide backwards without consideration, this time, for the limitations of reality or time or distance. Years fall away, experience and time and loss all unravel themselves, and when he opens his eyes again he’s himself as he used to be, less the weight of metal in his head in exchange for the smooth handle of a black scythe in his hands, as familiar in his grip as the sight of his own skin. This is his home, his and Spirit’s, the place they return to when they return from missions blood-spattered and exhausted in their own victory, and when Stein steps forward he moves slowly, careful to keep from disrupting the ghosts of the past that cling to the blurred periphery of his vision and layer themselves around him like glimpses of Soul Perception lingering far after the owners of those wavelengths have vanished.

Stein doesn’t turn the light on as he lets the door swing shut behind him. It’s easier to hold to illusion in the dark, easier to imagine a presence just at his side, just over his shoulder, in something less than the absolute truth of white light, and when he steps forward he moves slowly enough that the echo of his footsteps overlaps into the whisper of someone else following behind him. He shrugs off his coat as he passes the first door in the hallway, the entrance that leads to that room that used to be Spirit’s, that space that Stein still enters only as a visitor rather than an owner, and when he arrives at his study he drops the coat over the back of his chair before he falls to sit heavily against the support and leans in over the research he has been working on to fill the endless span of the night. Stein shuts his eyes, and breathes deep of nostalgia, and when he bends in over his notes he imagines he can hear the soft sound of breathing from rooms away, imagines that it’s the sound of his weapon partner and not his own idle movements that fill the empty space of the laboratory with proof of the life within it.


	5. Intimate

Stein doesn’t realize, at first, what it is he’s feeling.

He’s been lost to his work, occupying the more rational part of his mind with the clarity of his research and the focus that always comes with losing himself to the simplicity of black-on-white, words and equations and diagrams all blending together until he consumes them as easily as he breathes and with approximately as much intention. The rest of him is soothed by his own daydream, by the invention he crafted for himself to fill the long hours of a night spent alone; because there is no one else to occupy the laboratory around him, and whatever delusions he may indulge in will do no harm to anything but the shadows of isolation that would otherwise close in on him. Stein hunches over his desk, ignoring the ache in his shoulders and the burn of insomnia behind his eyes in favor of staring at the pages illuminated by too-little light and easing his mind with the incoherent ramblings of a daydream of companionship, until the transition from imagination to reality comes so smoothly he doesn’t see the edges of the seam. He’s thinking about his research, thinking about the equation he’s scrawling over the page, thinking about the arcane logic of the problem he’s seeking to solve; and then, very abruptly, he’s not, as his focus jerks away from the page in answer to an awareness so sudden and so vivid it’s as startling as if someone had shouted his name.

Stein turns away from his desk at once, pivoting aside from the papers and books scattered across the surface as his feet move before his thoughts have caught up to twist his chair and turn him in the direction of that sensation, as if his physical orientation really makes any difference at all in sensing. He can see nothing, of course, however wide-eyed the stare he fixes into the darkness may be, but it doesn’t matter; his self-made hallucination is gone, disintegrated like twilight giving way to the sudden advance of daybreak at midnight, because Stein knows that wavelength approaching in the distance, and his own inventions have always paled in comparison to the real thing.

It takes him a moment to react. He’s sure as soon as he feels it, as absolutely certain as if Spirit were standing directly before him; but he’s taught himself too many coping mechanisms to drop them all so quickly, even when they are rendered unnecessary by absolute conviction. He sits still for a long minute, running through the paths of logic once, twice, a third time to be sure: that Spirit  _ could _ be here, that he’s not in the grip of a hallucination, that he can recall how he arrived at this point. It’s late, he knows, far later than any sane person would be out to visit a friend; but then Stein has never been Spirit’s friend, exactly, and it’s never too late to come back home. Stein stares towards the front of the lab, feeling the shape of the approaching soul wavelength, parsing the texture of it, claiming the almost-flavor against his tongue; and then he pushes up from his chair in a surge of motion, and reaches to grab for his coat and pull it up over his shoulders as he strides forward to carry himself through the laboratory and to the heavy weight of the front doors.

Spirit is standing outside when Stein draws the door open, off-center from the front of the laboratory and with his face turned up to the cold blue light of the moon overhead. He doesn’t see Stein, doesn’t appear to have heard the sound of the door opening; his eyes are shut, his forehead creased as if he’s turning over some impossible problem within the wheels of his mind. For all the tension in his face his body is relaxed, his shoulders slumped to ease with the weight of his arms and his hands relaxed at his sides in spite of the wind sweeping over the slight rise of the hill on which the laboratory is located, and it’s the thought of that chill that draws Stein’s attention to the rest of what Spirit is wearing, which is not much, considering. He’s dressed, at least, pants and shirt and shoes all intact, but his shirt is untucked at one side and hanging loose around his wrists, where the unbuttoned cuffs are catching in the wind to blow open and bare halfway up the inside line of his forearm. Stein’s gaze catches at that strip of bare skin, trails up the inside of Spirit’s arm as his mind runs distant calculations about the chill of the wind, and the flush on Spirit’s cheeks, and the likelihood that the other has been spending his evening drinking alone in the silence of his apartment; and finally he drops his gaze to his own pocket, tipping his head down so he can watch what he’s doing as he draws a cigarette free and brings it to his lips to brace for the glow of the lighter he offers immediately after. He catches the end of the paper alight, draws in a deep lungful as if bracing himself, and it’s only then that he lifts his head and calls out to Spirit from the illusion of languid calm in the doorway.

“Are you planning to stand there until you rust, senpai?” Stein’s words are teasing, his tone light and amused over the top of them; he hears it like it’s someone else’s, as if he’s as much an audience as Spirit’s startled inhale and jerking motion makes of the other. His heart is thudding as fast in his chest as if it means to keep up with Spirit’s obvious shock, but when Stein lifts a hand to his lips to draw the cigarette free the motion is as graceful as if he’s tracing out the curve of a scythe blade with the tips of his fingers, his exhale as perfectly calm as the execution of a finishing blow to an opponent. “You’ll be more comfortable inside.”

Spirit stand still for a long moment, staring at Stein with such blank shock on his face that for a moment Stein wonders if he’s awake at all, if he hasn’t been borne over the distance of the city by the shuffling steps of a sleepwalker only to be jolted into disorienting wakefulness by Stein’s voice. But then he blinks hard, with enough force behind the motion to speak to the weight of emotion he’s holding back, and when he ducks his head forward to cast his face into shadow it’s Stein’s chest that eases, as if his own body is echoing the relief in Spirit’s. Stein steps to the side of the doorway, holding the door open and making space for Spirit as part of the same action, and Spirit comes forward to take the implicit invitation without waiting for more. Stein lets the door fall shut as Spirit moves past him, and when it swings solidly into the frame he feels the sound like punctuation for the easing of long-held tension in his chest.

Spirit stalls as soon as he’s through the door, hesitating at the entryway as if, even now, he’s uncertain of his welcome, unsure of his forward motion. Stein doesn’t bother speaking words to offer the clumsy reassurance that is all he’ll be able to muster at his lips; he moves instead, letting the memory still printed into his blood and bones carry them into familiarity, into a meister’s assumption of his weapon’s motion. Spirit follows him, his footsteps dropping into pace with Stein’s for all that they scuff with the weight of exhaustion or intoxication, and Stein is glad for the span of his shoulders to hide his expression as he breathes in against the end of his cigarette and tastes the heat of Spirit’s presence in the air.

“You’re up late,” he says, his voice as level as if he’s making a casual observation, as if Spirit arriving unprompted on his doorstep in the middle of the night is no more than vaguely interesting instead of a wish so long-held he can hardly trust to its reality. He touches at the screw at the side of his head, bracing his fingers to crank it through a  _ click _ of motion, but the sound of footsteps behind him doesn’t give way, the feel of Spirit’s wavelength glowing off the walls around him holds steady as sunlight on his skin, and when he looks back the other is still there, hunched shoulders and downcast eyes and all. “Were you out at ChupaCabra’s again?”

Stein’s tone is flat, the closest thing to perfect neutrality he can offer, but Spirit grimaces as if the words are loaded with the judgment of an accusation and shakes his head hard. “No,” he says. “I went straight home from the DWMA tonight.”

Stein lifts a hand to his mouth to hold the cigarette steady for another drag. “You smell like alcohol.”

“I had a nightcap at home,” Spirit says, still with his head ducked forward like he’s a child braced against a scolding. “I spilled some on my shirt when I woke up.”

“Keeping the glass in easy reach?”

“I was on the couch,” Spirit says. “I had a nightmare and fell off the--” and he cuts himself off, his words giving way at the same time his head comes up to fix Stein with the full force of a scowl. “This is none of your business anyway, Stein. I’m a grown man, I can take care of myself.”

Stein disagrees; not from a lack of belief in the other’s ability, not when Spirit’s influence has been the sole restraining force on his own Madness for all of his life since he first stepped through the doors of the DWMA and into their partnership. But Spirit has never done well in isolation, left to the hum of his own insecurities and his desperate need to be everything to all people, and the weight of those impossible expectations are showing in more than just the rumpled weight of his clothes and the shadows of misery in his face and clinging to the alcohol on his breath. Spirit excels at support, at lending strength to the direction laid out for him by another; alone he has scattered himself into pieces, torn his potential asunder by spreading it in too many different directions, until he looks as lost now as Stein knows he was himself, that first day they met as strangers.

He puts voice to none of this. Instead:

“If you say so,” he says, and turns away to continue down the hallway, the very picture of unconcern. There’s a pause behind him, the silence enough to speak to Spirit’s surprise, and then the sound of footsteps, fast at first as Spirit comes forward before slowing to match Stein’s own pace just over the other’s shoulder.

Stein can almost predict what Spirit will say, is drawing a breath of his own just as Spirit catches a sharp inhale to speak in a rush. “Sorry,” he says, much softer than before and aching with sincerity. “It’s been a long time since anyone worried about me.”

“Mm,” Stein hums, acknowledgment more than surprise, and he takes another breath off his cigarette. Spirit hesitates, like he’s thinking of saying something more, but in the end he lets his words go unvoiced and they continue down the corridor in silence but for the sound of their footsteps. Stein listens to the pace of his breathing, to the rhythm of his heartbeat, until Spirit coughs to clear his throat and speaks again.

“How did you know I was out there?”

Stein thinks about lying, about equivocating, and gives up both as unnecessary. “I felt you.”

He can feel Spirit’s surprise like a jolt of electricity through the air. “You  _ what _ ?”

“I felt you.” Stein doesn’t look back to see Spirit’s expression. He can feel the weight of the other’s disbelieving stare pressing against his shoulders like a palm against his coat. “Your wavelength, I mean.”

There’s a beat of silence loud with Spirit’s disbelief. “You remember my soul wavelength?”

He makes it sound an impossibility, as if Stein is more likely to be making a joke than giving voice to the one truth he has known for absolute for all the years he has spent alone with the memory of his partner’s presence a force better than gravity for fixing him in place. Stein tips his head back to see the disbelief in Spirit’s expression and answer it with a smile whose softness he learned from the man trailing in his wake. “Of course I do, senpai.” Stein is startled himself at the sound of his voice, at the gentleness that spills from his tongue, but Spirit colors red all across his cheeks before he ducks his head to hide his features, and that’s enough to spread Stein’s smile wider over his face before he turns back to their trajectory through the laboratory.

Stein knows where they’re going. Much of the laboratory space still remains unused, left too cold by the years of separation for him to have yet stirred it towards the waking life he has drawn himself into, but there’s that bedroom near the front door, that space that remains Spirit’s even if he is no longer Stein’s, and there is another room that Stein has reclaimed from the stasis of the past, even if he hasn’t made much use of it himself as yet. It seemed an indulgence at the time, an invocation of nostalgia more self-gratifying than logical; with Spirit trailing in his wake now, Stein feels as if the impulse was near-prescient in identifying the need for something like neutral ground for them both.

It’s Spirit who recognizes it first, so immediately that he’s stepping past Stein for the first time since his entrance with a display of true enthusiasm “Our living room,” he blurts, sounding as absolutely pleased as if Stein has called up the space from the past just to make a gift of it for him; which isn’t entirely incorrect, anyway, Stein supposes. “It’s all just the way it was.” Spirit steps forward to pace around the room, his shoulders eased on the startled pleasure of recognition; his fingers come out to touch at the back of the sofa, his breath breaks onto an almost-pained laugh. “I can’t believe you kept the couch.”

“It was convenient,” Stein says, a truth if not the whole of one. He takes another inhale from his cigarette, the last he can claim before he leans in to stub it out against the ashtray on the coffee table. “You can sit down if you want.”

Spirit moves immediately to obey, stepping forward with alacrity as if Stein has granted him a gift by inviting him to sit. He falls to the cushions, dropping himself with a speed Stein recalls from the aftermath of fights or the conclusion of long school days, when Spirit would move with grace enough to his exhaustion to make it seem a dance. Or maybe it’s just Stein’s gaze that gave it that form, that laced beauty into the unthinking backward tilt of Spirit’s head at the support of the cushion and warmth under the sigh he offers to the air; Stein doesn’t care the cause, not when the entire room seems to be easing itself into as much comfort as Spirit himself just for the addition of the weapon’s presence. Spirit’s eyes are shut, his lashes spread heavy over his cheeks and his hair tangling against the couch supporting his head; for a breath Stein stands over him, looking down at the part of his lips and the pale line of his throat, physicality turned to art by instinctive grace. Then he turns his head, fixing his gaze on the coffee table instead to hold his attention under control while he gives in to the impulse to draw closer, to take the implicit invitation of Spirit’s surrender to come nearer and fit himself to the cushions alongside the other man. Stein can feel his blood coming hotter, can feel his heart beating faster; it takes deliberate effort to find mundanity for his voice, to fall back into the rhythm of meaningless small talk just for something to draw more speech from Spirit’s lips. “Do you want some coffee?”

Even when Spirit shakes his head he doesn’t open his eyes. Stein looks at him sideways around the frames of his glasses. He can see the dark of individual lashes over the purple of sleeplessness under Spirit’s eyes, can see the flush of lingering emotion and intoxication still clinging to the other’s cheeks. “No,” Spirit says. “I just want to sleep.” He yawns hugely, his shoulders tensing and then easing with the action to leave him boneless-heavy against the support of the couch. “I’m exhausted.”

It seems strange, to have to put words to such a patently obvious conclusion; but then, Spirit has never been very good at making allowances for himself, even when they are as vividly clear as this one. Stein looks away and fixes his gaze back on the ashtray at the coffee table. “So sleep.”

Spirit shifts against the couch to turn his head and finally open his eyes to gaze at Stein. Stein doesn’t turn to look at him but he can feel the crease at Spirit’s forehead, can sense the tremor at his lips. “Can I?”

He makes the question sound desperate, as unsure as if he really thinks Stein is going to reject him, like too many years of too many disappointments have left him unable to count on this one thing that is all Stein has ever had to give him. Stein can’t look at him -- he doesn’t think he can stand to see the raw need in Spirit’s face, doesn’t know if his heart can take it -- so he keeps his gaze locked forward instead, pinned to the stub of his cigarette in the ashtray as if there’s anything of real interest about it.

“Sure,” he says. He lifts his arm without looking; he can almost feel the color of Spirit’s hair hanging in the air, as if the shade alone is enough to glow warmth into a path for Stein’s fingers to follow. His hand fits at the back of the couch, his arm close enough to press in over the line of Spirit’s shoulders, and his fingers come up of their own accord to wind in against the soft weight of the other’s hair. Spirit melts to the touch, collapsing in and towards Stein as if some brittle resistance in him is giving way in a single shudder of relief. He loses his balance at once, exhaustion overcoming any chance he might have at catching himself, but Stein is there next to him to stall what could be a tumble onto the floor and catch Spirit against him instead. Spirit lands against his leg, his whole body canting in and against Stein beneath him, and Stein watches his fingers slide up and in, winding themselves far into that brilliant red that has held his attention since he could wonder at the warmth of it, since he first imagined the feel of the silky strands against his fingers. Spirit tenses, his shoulder flexing like he’s suddenly recalled where he is and who he’s with, but it’s only a moment before his arm goes slack again, giving way to the drag of fingers through his hair as surely as if Stein had given voice to a command.

Stein can hear the breath Spirit takes, can parse the strain of uncertainty on it. When Spirit quavers an exhale Stein can feel the warmth of it spill against the support of his leg; when he speaks Stein can feel the tremor on his voice as if his own blood is humming resonance with it. “Are you sure this is okay, Stein?”

Stein watches the fall of Spirit’s hair over his fingers, looks at the slump of Spirit’s shoulders against the support he offers, the simple comfort of another person’s presence, of someone else to take responsibility for a breath, for a minute, for a night. He draws his touch in and back, smoothing the locks away from the lines in Spirit’s face, the exhaustion so clear in those familiar features. “Yes,” he says, and means it in every way, as if answering a decade of uncertainty with that one word. “It’s late, senpai.” When Stein touches against the curve of Spirit’s ear he can see the other’s lashes flutter, can watch the shift of Spirit’s mouth going soft on appreciation even if it remains silent in his throat, and Stein can feel his whole chest tighten like a fist to hold onto this moment, this breath, this heartbeat.

“Go to sleep,” Stein says, and his weapon heaves a sigh like relief, and shuts his eyes, and obeys.


	6. Harmonize

Stein knows what nightmares look like.

They’re familiar experiences for him. He has spent his whole life sharing space within his mind with the inventions that his psyche creates for him, twisted abominations and shrieking terror and the awful, uncanny almosts of his reality, as his Madness contorts everything Stein has ever relied on into shifting sand, strips away the foundation beneath him to leave him falling endlessly until shock jolts him awake to lie breathless and clammy in the sweat of whatever fever-dream claimed his restless sleep. He trades insomnia for horror, gives up the weight of consciousness only for the overwhelming play of fear and insanity building one atop each other within his own mind, until he takes his dreams as a matter of course, a consequence of surrendering to sleep as surely as breathing is a necessity for survival. Stein has long since resigned himself to the shadows that haunt his rest; nightmares are a familiar burden, now, something almost as comforting as the dull, ceaseless roar of insanity that winds itself headache-tight against the grate of the screw set into his head. He thought bad dreams held no more horrors for him, thought himself victorious over the fears of the sleeping mind.

It’s harder than he had thought it would be, to see Spirit in the grip of one.

Spirit used to sleep deeply. Stein has better occasion than most to know exactly how deeply; even without any aid from one or another of the anesthetics Stein sometimes made use of, Spirit slept without stirring, sometimes without moving at all, tangled into his sheets and with his hair tousled around his head and as entirely lost in his own unconsciousness as anything Stein could ever imagine finding for himself. Spirit slept the dark, restful sleep of a child, without any of an adult’s terrors to haunt him, and in the calm of his face Stein could always find a glimpse of some peace that he craved with every aching beat of his jealous heart.

There is no trace of that peace now. Spirit claimed perhaps a half hour of unbroken rest, so deeply unconscious Stein had hardly been able to hear his breathing even in the absolute silence of the laboratory around them; but the shift of his eyelids that spoke to his rise to dreams brought tension with it keen enough that Stein can feel it in the line of Spirit’s shoulders as clearly as he can track it between the dark of arched brows and the set of a soft mouth, and if Stein doesn’t know what haunts the other’s dreams he can see the result of it in every jerky catch of Spirit’s breath, in every motion made an abortive twitch by the paralysis of sleep that has so laid claim to the other. Stein watches for what feels like an hour, what feels like a lifetime of tracking stormcloud horrors drifting over Spirit’s expression and tensing into the line of his mouth; then Spirit’s throat works, he gasps over a choking inhale, and it’s only Stein reaching to grab the other’s shoulder and hold him steady that stalls Spirit’s sudden jolt to consciousness shy of throwing him off the couch entirely. Spirit grabs at the other, to push or clutch Stein doesn’t know which, and Stein tightens his grip with the simplicity of instinct to hold them both steady instead of tumbling forward to the floor.

“Senpai,” he says, as soothing a tone as he can manage, but Spirit is still struggling, frantic in whatever his mind has made for him and too disoriented to find his way back to himself. Stein draws a breath to fill his lungs, to swell the span of his chest with a force he hasn’t used in long years, with a casual dominance that has gone too long without its intended audience.

“ _ Senpai _ ” he says, his voice dragging over his meister-tone, that absolute command drawn from the rush of battle and the weight of life-or-death responsibilities, and Spirit chokes and gasps and blinks his eyes wide like he’s rising from the surface of that storm-dark sea in which he’s been sunk. His motion stills, his strength gives way, but Stein tightens his hold all the same, pressing with intention now to relocate the other to reality, to draw him back from the haze of illusion and memory in which he has been wandering. “You’re fine, senpai.”

“Stein,” Spirit gasps. When he turns his head his eyes are wide and overbright with panic instead of hazy with sleep; he blinks hard before the blue clears of enough adrenaline to focus on the other’s face. Stein can see the exact moment recognition hits the other, as all the strain in Spirit’s expression gives way for a moment to throw him back in time to the wide-eyed student he used to be when they were children. The fingers against Stein’s arm tighten to squeeze reassurance for himself. “You’re here.”

Spirit sounds shocked, startled all the way down to his bones by the other’s presence; as if there’s anywhere else Stein would be, if his weapon needed him, as if that one fact is enough to chase away all the shadows of whatever unconscious fears may have held Spirit in their grip. Stein has to take a moment to steady his voice before he can trust himself to speak with anything like neutrality on the shape of his words. “I’m here.”

Spirit stares up at Stein for a moment, still looking as if he’s been knocked clear out of himself by shock. Then he blinks, and turns his head in a rush, like he’s trying to hide a secret that’s already long-since spilled. “Oh.” He swallows hard, like he’s holding back words, and when he lets Stein’s arm go it’s to fumble at the couch cushions to push himself upright instead. Stein lets him go instead of clinging to him, but Spirit doesn’t draw away from the weight of Stein’s hand where it’s fallen at the small of his back, and Stein doesn’t pull away either. Spirit lifts a hand to his hair, the motion sketching out an arc as if to urge the weight of it back from his face, but his fingers catch into the tangles and he barely begins the motion before his arm falls back to his side with weight enough to waver his whole balance. His ducks his head forward to let his hair swing before his features again, and when he laughs there’s no humor on the sound, just the rasping shadow of resignation.

“God,” he says, softly enough that it’s only the quiet around them that leaves the word audible. “I’m a disaster.”

There’s a lifetime of self-loathing in Spirit’s tone, a bitter edge that Stein recognizes as clearly as he does the shadows of insomnia under the other’s eyes and the set of tension at his mouth. He shakes his head without thinking, without considering that Spirit can no more see his expression than he can see the weapon’s. His fingers slide against the hunch of Spirit’s shoulders, pacing out against the tension against the other’s vertebrae as if Stein can tug the stress free on contact. “You’re fine.”

Spirit’s hair swings with the shake of his head. “I’m not,” he says, his voice skipping louder in his need to resist, in the intensity of his disagreement. “I’m not sleeping. I’m drinking too much. I’m barely doing my job at all.” His shoulders flex under Stein’s touch, bone pulling sweeping curves of motion out along the rumpled fabric of his loose shirt. “I’m sure I would have been fired ages ago if there were anyone else around to be a Death Scythe.”

Spirit’s speaking faster, now, his words falling one over the other with the rising haste of something like panic; Stein can feel the tremor of emotion building under his palm like it’s steam rising to the surface of Spirit’s blood. “My daughter hates me. My ex-wife left me.” Another cough of a laugh, scraped bloody on the absolute lack of humor beneath it. “There’s no one in the whole of Death City who can stand to be around me.”

Stein’s heart is beating in his chest, a steady thud so solid he can feel it echoing in his ears like it’s matching itself to the rhythm of Spirit’s voice, laying itself to a foundation for the stumbling steps forward the other is trying to take. “I’m here.”

“Sure,” Spirit says, answering without listening, carried away on the rising tide of his own misery, the swelling unhappiness he has borne too long alone to even recognize help when it’s offered to him. “For now. How long are you going to stay? Do you even know?” When he turns his head his eyes are brilliant, a summer sky washed to purest blue by the wet threatening his lashes and twisting to a pained smile against his lips. When he drags a breath Stein can feel the strain on it as if it’s laid into his own throat. “How long before you leave me alone again?”

Spirit means the words to be rhetorical, Stein knows, means the question to be so obvious that it doesn’t even merit a true response. Stein can hear the cracked edges of that brittle amusement on the other’s voice, where the shell of composure has caved in to tear the bleeding edge of a plea onto Spirit’s tongue. But more than that, more than the hurt and more than the desperation and more even than the need on Spirit’s voice that makes what’s meant as a question into a heartwrenching supplication: it’s the bright of his eyes, the color of them brought clear from exhaustion and intoxication and self-consciousness to meet Stein’s own gaze, to give up the whole story of a dozen years in the moment of their eyes meeting again. Stein gazes at Spirit, at the shine of tears in those eyes that haven’t changed in all this time, that stare that meets his just the same as it ever did all those long years ago, and then he lets the tension in his shoulders go, and he lets his hand lift up and out.

His fingers find their way to Spirit’s hair. It’s the first place he wants to touch, the one thing he has remembered through all the years of grey: that color like the crimson in Stein’s own veins, suited to the emotion that Spirit wears as easily and openly as the wrinkled sleeves of his dress shirt. Spirit’s lashes dip at the press of Stein’s hands to his face, his attention fracturing to the weight of Stein’s fingers, and for a moment Stein watches him unobserved, reading the flicker of simple pleasure in Spirit’s lashes and the part of his lips easing on the huff of his breathing. Stein’s fingers curl in against Spirit’s head, his thumbs slide against the curve of Spirit’s ears, and Spirit’s chin lifts, just barely, his head tipping back to give its weight up to the support of Stein’s hands against him. Stein can feel the trust in the motion, such a minimal gesture to speak so loudly of the instinct that is still there, the faith still present even under all the scars Stein has offered and all the time they have measured, and when Spirit angles his head back to turn his soft-parted lips up to the light Stein’s instinct answers and rocks his weight forward to press his mouth in and against the heat of Spirit’s own.

Spirit’s mouth is warm. Stein knows how warm Spirit feels against his hands, knows the radiance of the other’s soul wavelength in the back of his head or winding close against his own in the transcendent bliss of Resonance; but this is an entirely different kind of intimacy, something breathless and strange and dizzying exactly for its sheer physicality. Stein knows the shape of Spirit’s mind, knows the texture of his soul and the taste of his thoughts and the strange, graceful weight of the weapon that lives within the steady beat of blood in his veins: but this is new, a novelty of experience where he believed familiarity to have long since held sway. Spirit’s skin is soft, always startlingly warm against the comparative chill of Stein’s fingers; but Spirit’s mouth is like painless fire, glowing with all the heat of his living blood pressing close against skin run so thin on sensitivity that Stein imagines he can feel the pressure of Spirit’s heartbeat fitting against the weight of his mouth. But it’s not just Spirit: there’s Stein too, his existence still separate even as he presses impossibly close, as he shifts to fit his mouth flush against Spirit’s own, to find out how to match his body to his weapon’s while yet maintaining the line between their souls that blurs and fades in Resonance. It’s heady, more intoxicating than the richest wine Stein has ever tasted, pleasure and heat with an immediacy that quivers through the whole of the body that yet remains his own, and when he draws away it’s with his heart pounding in time with the quiver of Spirit’s fingers, raised to tremor against the outside of Stein’s wrist without tightening to a hold.

“I’m here,” Stein says, truth spilling from his lips with a weight he didn’t know he could put there. He doesn’t think he’s ever been more immediately, absolutely present in a moment than he is in this one, with Spirit’s hair tangling at his fingers and Spirit’s gaze wandering his features and the print of Spirit’s mouth tethering him to this reality, this place, this moment. Stein takes a breath and tightens his fingers against Spirit’s head, steadying the other as if to hold that blue-eyed gaze on him by intensity alone. “You’re my weapon, senpai.”

Spirit’s forehead creases, his breath catches. For a moment he looks like he’s on the verge of tears again, as if without Stein’s hold on him he might crumble into pieces right where he sits just from the force of the other’s words. “Still?”

Stein’s lips curl at the corner, a smile tugging at his mouth without his conscious thought in answer to the unintentional absurdity of that question, the implication that there could ever be any weapon that was truly his but the one right in front of him. “Always.”

Spirit’s breath comes out of him into the shape of a sob. “Oh,” he manages, his voice cracking open over the sound; and then, in a rush: “You’re my meister,” sounding as desperate as if he’s trying to convince himself of the reality of this absolutely true fact.

Stein doesn’t make any attempt at all to hold back the smile that spreads over his mouth, that curves his lips on the shape of sincerity. “I know,” he says, simple confirmation of a simple fact, and Spirit shuts his eyes as if in expectation even before Stein leans in towards the shape of the other’s lips. He lingers in the contact for a moment, letting the heat of Spirit’s mouth bleed over to glow warmth under the surface of his own cool skin, and when he finally draws back it’s with his lashes heavy with pleasure and his mouth caught around a smile taken directly from the friction of Spirit’s mouth. Spirit’s gaze is hazy, his head still tipped to the side like he’s lost in the recollection of Stein’s mouth at his own, and Stein smooths his hands back into Spirit’s hair and feels his chest ache like it’s a flower opening to the sun for the first time in the whole of his life. He could go on forever, he thinks, could stay like this for the rest of his life, pressing his mouth to Spirit’s and tracking the flush of pleasure under the other’s skin; but there are those shadows under Spirit’s lashes, and those lines of exhaustion at the corners of his so-soft mouth, and Stein is his meister, after all, with the responsibility that must come with that.

“You should rest,” he says. “It’s late.”

Spirit’s lashes dip, Spirit’s mouth shifts towards something Stein would call a pout, on someone a decade younger. “You’re not going to sleep, are you?”

Stein smiles. “Who knows?” It’s not the teasing it might be, in other circumstances; he doesn’t know what kind of world he is in, now, doesn’t know what new impossibility could break over him next. His fingers shift, marking out a path of their own to trail their weight over the rumpled color of Spirit’s shirt before curling against the other’s shoulder to tug in towards him. Spirit capitulates at once, as quickly as if he’s sensing Stein’s inclination before feeling the pressure, and when his head lands at Stein’s shoulder Stein can feel some long-held tension easing in his chest, a fist held taut for years finally uncurling into as much relaxation as the weight of his fingers in Spirit’s hair.

“I’m here,” he says again. Relaxed fingers find their way to Spirit’s hair to slide through the strands and slip in against the line of the other’s neck before dropping to the dip of Spirit’s waist to draw them a little closer, to brace a little more of the weight of Spirit’s body against his own. “Sleep, senpai.”

Spirit doesn’t speak in answer. He stays still for a moment, leaning against Stein’s shoulder and trusting the support of his body to the other’s hold, and when he does move it’s without words, without anything to gesture to the action beyond the motion of his arm coming up to press around Stein’s waist in turn. Stein feels his shoulders unknotting, feels his body melting like ice giving way to human warmth too-long forgotten, and against him Spirit sighs a breath and goes slack, giving up all the tension in his body to the support of Stein against him. Stein stays still for a moment, gazing unseeing at the familiarity of the room around him while his mind catalogs details: the catch of Spirit’s hair at his shoulder, the weight of the arm draped around his waist, the soft sound of inhales dropping into the slow-paced murmur of sleep against him. Then he lets a breath go, and tips his head back against the couch, and lets his eyes shut to follow Spirit into the heavy weight of calm, comforting sleep.


End file.
